“Ah, but you must obey me now—­do as I tell you in everything,” he said with perfect seriousness of mien and accent.  “You have given yourself to me now, and if I ask you to kiss me you must, just as readily as Fina, and let me caress and pet you as much as I like.”

“Must I? but I do not like it,” said Leam simply.

He laughed outright, and—­Jones not looking—­took her hand and carried it to his lips.  “Is this unpleasant?” he asked, looking up from under his eyebrows.

Leam blushed, hesitated, trembled.  “No,” she then said in a low voice, “not from you.”

On which he kissed it again, and Leam had no wish to retract her confession.

“Now go and make ready to come to the castle,” he said after a moment’s pause.  “I told you before that you must obey me, now that you have promised to be my wife.  Command is the husband’s privilege, Leam, and obedience the wife’s happiness:  don’t you know?  So come, darling!  They were all to assemble at two,” looking at his watch, “and here we are close on three!  You do not wish not to go now, my pet?”

“No,” said Leam, with her happy little fleeting smile:  “I am glad to go.  I shall be with you, and you wish it.”

“What an exquisite little creature!  In a week she will come to my hand like a tame bird,” was Edgar’s thought as he watched her slender, graceful figure slowly crossing the lawn with that undulating step of her mother’s nation.  “In a week’s time I shall have tamed her,” he repeated with a difference; and he felt glad that he had bespoken Leam Dundas betimes, and that fate and fortune had made him her prospective proprietor.  “She will make me happy,” he said as his last thought:  he forgot to add either assurance or hope that he should make her the same.  That is not generally part of a man’s matrimonial calculations.

The confidence of love soon grows.  When Leam came back to the seat under the cut-leaved hornbeam, where Edgar still waited for her to have the pleasure of watching her approach, she was not so much ashamed and oppressed as when he had first found her there.  She did not want to run away, and she was losing her fear of wrongdoing.  She was beginning instead to feel that delightful sense of dependence on a strong man’s love which—­pace the third sex born in these odd latter times—­is the most exquisite sensation that a woman can know.  She was no longer alone—­no longer an alien imprisoned in family bonds, but, though one of a family, always an alien and imprisoned, never homed and united.  Now she was Edgar’s as she had been mamma’s; and there was dawning on her the consciousness of the same oneness, the same intimate union of heart and life and love, as she had had with mamma.  She belonged to him.  He loved her, and she—­yes, she knew now that she had always loved him, had always lived for him.  He was the secret god whom she had carried about with her in her soul from the beginning—­the